28 years of coaching. One student at a time.
FM Nicholas Van Der Nat · FIDE Master · FIDE Trainer · 3× South African Closed Champion
I started ChessExcellence 28 years ago because I noticed something wrong with how chess players were being taught: they were treated as a generic curriculum to move through, not as individuals with their own way of learning. I built ChessExcellence to put the individual first, structuring a plan around how you think and where you actually lose rating points, not a one-size lesson plan.
I coach one on one. There is no roster of coaches behind me and no handoff to someone else once you sign up. Every Strategy Assessment, every study plan, every session is run by me personally, using the same Socratic method and the same two frameworks, the Piece Activity Count and the Rule of Three, that I use to evaluate my own games as a FIDE Master. You can see exactly how I teach before you ever pay me: my fourteen free lessons on Capablanca's fundamentals use the same method on real games.
A course shows you strong moves. It cannot see the move you were about to play, or the reason you nearly played it. As a FIDE Master I have spent my life reading positions the way you read a sentence, and that lets me name the specific habit costing you rating points, not a vague weakness. The value is not that I know more openings than a database. It is that I can look at your real games and tell you the two or three things that will actually move your rating, then build the plan that fixes them.
I start every student with a diagnosis, not a curriculum. Before I teach you anything, I look at your real games and find the patterns in how you decide under pressure. From there I coach the way I evaluate my own games, through questions rather than lectures, so you learn to find the answer yourself the next time the position calls for it. Two frameworks run through everything I teach: the Piece Activity Count, which keeps your pieces working instead of sitting, and the Rule of Three, which stops you committing to a plan before you have checked it. The goal is a thinking process you can trust in your own games, long after the session ends.
My students range from serious beginners under 800 to tournament players well past 1800. What they share is a decision to stop guessing and start working from a structured, personal plan built around their life and their schedule. If you are a driven adult who wants to understand the why behind your moves instead of memorizing more lines, you are exactly who I built ChessExcellence for.
A good chess coach for an adult improver does two things a course or an app cannot. First, I look at your actual games, not generic puzzles, and I name the two or three habits that are really costing you rating points. Second, I build you a sequenced plan around your life, not a one-size curriculum. As a FIDE Master and FIDE Trainer with a verified competitive record, including three South African national titles, I bring real playing strength to that diagnosis, and I stay hands-on through the whole process. You get direct contact with me, not a rotating roster of instructors. That personal, structured relationship is what actually moves your rating.
One of my students, Gene, was recently featured on Chess Journeys: Tales of Adult Improvement, a podcast dedicated to the real, unfiltered stories of adult chess improvement. He spoke about his return to the game, his openings, his thought process, and the coaching that's shaped his approach this time around. Listen to Episode 275 →
Across the students I've tracked on Lichess and Chess.com, the average rating gain is +548 points in rapid and +438 points in classical, verified directly from their public rating histories, not self-reported. See the full results →